This episode is about the productivity paradox. The Productivity paradox has been around for a while, and it’s the economist’s way of saying “we don’t see the productivity value from our investment in IT”. So the question is, companies and people have invested a ton of cash in, I’ll say, desktop IT. Over the 40 years we’ve been doing this, we’re not seeing a productivity increase.
The background: Most analysts believe we saw a productivity increase when there was huge investment in industry. In other words, the productivity of manual labor, in Peter Drucker’s terms, increased dramatically through the entire 20th century.
And economists being economists, they’re looking for the same kind of thing based on our IT investment, and we’re simply not seeing it in the larger aggregate numbers. We’re just not seeing it. And this is a real, real curious idea, because we want to think about your productivity, you being productive as a knowledge worker. Desktop IT – why no productivity increase
The height of knowledge worker technology is the desktop stuff that we use. I don’t mean desktop versus laptop. I mean Office Productivity stuff. I wonder if the problem is not how we’re going about it. If we agree with the economists who say that we’re not seeing a productivity increase, then the very next question for us is why? What I believe the “why” is
In this episode I’ll talk about what I believe the why is, and then we’ll work on some actionable steps from that to help us be productive. If you’re thinking the computer, by itself, makes you more productive, then I don’t believe that. I believe that there’s some secret sauce that we can add to our current technology that will make you disproportionately productive in the work world.
The good news – we can gain an advantage
- The desktop doesn’t seem to have changed the way we work
- Bigger picture – an office worker from 100 years ago – typing speed We haven’t actually gotten rid of paper. Even if we did a document is still a document
- Email is just faster correspondence – the problem is not speed, but asynchronocity
- If the whole world gets faster, we don’t get differentially better
But, everything has changed, right? NO
- BPR (Business Process Reengineering) – we didn’t really do it – paving cow paths
- Productivity still needs to be rethought and engineered
- Operating systems – no change since Win 3.11 (1993, Mac was earlier)
- And our metaphors are even older – see Episode 29
- An idea for OS UI improvement – just dump to the computer
- Mobile technology – neither wireless or mobile has really changed anything
- We have the same apps and metaphors on mobile
- SMS Text is not better than voicemail
- Peripherals
- A keyboard is a keyboard – QWERTY since 1870s
- The mouse has been available since 1981
- AI – different/better, or just faster for the same old stuff. There’s a good argument here, but it’s wait and see
OK, Why?
- Radical is not the plural of incremental
- Advancement is not incremental
- Local optimum and the J-curve
- I don’t think faster by itself, gives us more productivity
- It certainly doesn’t give us differential productivity – everybody has it
- Faster is easy; better is hard
- Stop thinking that our primary input is time. But even then, we’re not that much faster, where it counts.
Bad habits we get from technology
- Newer is better. Fact: it may be faster, but that (by itself) is not better.
- Multitasking – it’s bad, even though our devices are good at it
- Focusing on time as productivity
- But, it’s FASTER… Nope – Moore’s law and Gates’s law
I buy it, what do we do about it?
- We can’t change our apps very much, so the answer is not there
- Switching apps is VERY COSTLY for much the same feature set, upgrades usually don’t pay off
- If we want to be differentially productive, then we need to do different things
- I think there are opportunities in the following places:
- Manage your attention, not your time – stop thinking that faster is equal to more productive – the correlation is not great
- Apps are not written for improved productivity, but for improved speed just to do whatever they already do. Most are written for more usage.
- Just because a technology is new, doesn’t mean it’s better. But if you need to relearn it (i.e. an interface change), then think hard before updating.
- Learn the features of the apps you have – maybe find something you didn’t know existed – but think BETTER, not simply FASTER
- If you’re a knowledge worker, look to improve the processes that don’t involve your computer – you probably don’t have enough control over your computer environment to make meaningful change.
- File storage – is there some way to store files better?
What I’ve learned from Attention Compass research
- Have a single app that you can ‘dump’ to, just record ideas. Think snippets, tweets, SMS…
- It should always be handy. The more steps to get to it, the better chance you forget.
- File system – Evernote (and perhaps other tools) allows the creation of a different kind of file system.